![]() ![]() The authors focus instead on another Aurora, a lovely cartoon creature who lives in a fairy tale world of tea parties and princes. Aurora (we learn her name from the notebook strewn beside her) is not the focus of this graphic novel-or at least not this version of her. Over the course of the next few dozen pages, her body rots to bones.ĭespite the mysteries and plot questions evoked by the opening image-Who is she? How did she die? Is there a killer? When will someone discover her body?-the novel ignores them all. Her hair is splayed around her head, and although her eyes are closed and her body could be relaxed in sleep, she is unquestionably dead. ![]() The girl of Beautiful Darkness looks to be about ten-years-old. Poe misogynistically claims there’s no subject more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman (“ The Philosophy of Composition“), but since his wife was 13 when he married her, “girl” would be the more accurate term. I’m a parent and so especially susceptible to the horror of the image, but it’s more than that. The sixth page of Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët‘s Beautiful Darkness is currently haunting me: a child’s corpse lying on a forest floor. ![]() They become afterimages, a kind of mental scar marring your visual memory. ![]()
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